Copeland, Nash

ORAL HISTORY OF NASH COPELAND
May 23, 1972
At the home of Mr. & Mrs. J. Nash Copeland
Interviewer: Today is May 23, 1972 and we’re at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Nash Copeland. We’ll start off with asking Mr. Copeland when he came to the now Oak Ridge area.
Mr. Copeland: I came to this area in, my family originally bought the farm where the Marina now is in the year 1919 from the Cross family, but at that time I was in school in Knox County. My father was one of the county officials there. He was Register of Deeds of Knox County and we lived at Inskip. So we didn’t move down here officially until about 1922, but I didn’t come and follow the family until after I graduated from school in 1923. In fact it was almost 1924 before I got here because I was working in Knoxville and kept my job there after I got out of school. The people from Knoxville thought this was a very far away place because it took an overnight trip. It wasn’t coming back, it wasn’t come and go in one day, it almost had to be an overnight trip. One of the boys that was courting one of my sisters is about the first person down here that made an overnight trip in a T Model Ford at that time. I expect we were one of the first people who brought cars over the road from Edgemoor to Elzy (Elza). She’ll ask you the question, what you want to know, I’ll try to answer them for you.
Interviewer: Okay, what did you do when you finally moved to this area? Did you move into the farmhouse with your family? And did you all farm or what did you do?
Mr. Copeland: Yes, our total living was made from farming. We did most of our farming with mules and horses. My dad was a kind of a farmer that believed in walking. He didn’t believe in doing farming the easy way, ‘cause we had to plow those bottoms with the walking plow while our neighbors was using riding plows. I never will forget that.
Interviewer: What were the boundaries of your farm? Can you tell us?
Mr. Copeland: Well, from the present boundaries, our land run from the top of Pilot Knob or that’s the ridge to the north, over to the top of the ridge on the south side. Our line went from the top of one ridge to the other and straight down to the river. So we had a little over a mile of river bottom banks there. We only extended up the valley about half a mile to join the Wright farm. Theirs was the next farm up above us. It was approximately about six hundred acres including the ridge land in the boundaries of the farm. However most of it, a lot of it was not farmable, it was just mostly timberland. Had some very fine timber on the farm at that time.
Interviewer: Did you have a place to buy your staples and clothing? Was there a store near by?
Mr. Copeland: The only thing you could buy would have been a little tobacco, fat back, a little sugar or something like that at a little store in Elza, that’s straight up the river from where the original first Elza Gate was. The man had a store right there along the highway, a Mr. Hill and that was about half a mile below the Elza railroad station. But most of our purchases had to be made in Knoxville and hauled to this part of the country.
Interviewer: Would one person go and shop for all the neighbors once a week or…?
Mr. Copeland: Well, not all the neighbors. We did kind of keep things for our farm, the hands that worked on the farm. But no, each person done their own individual shopping because there wasn’t very much money left to shop with. We didn’t have much money to do any shopping with.
Interviewer: But now you all had cars to go to Knoxville in at this time?
Mr. Copeland: Very few people had cars at that time. We had an old Hupmobile and one of the neighbors, Mr. Jack Grubb, he lived about two miles up the road just above where the rehabilitation, in fact that’s part of his farm, he had an old car but that was the only two cars in the valley right at that time. Everybody else either used horses or mules or horse and buggy.
Interviewer: And that would take them quite a bit longer I’d suspect?
Mr. Copeland: Well they didn’t, in fact we had to use the horse and buggy in the wintertime, we certainly couldn’t use a car. There was no gravel on any of the roads out here. The only road that was gravel was the one running from Clinton to Oliver Springs. Of course the Edgemoor Road was gravel from Edgemoor to Scarboro and it came into the Oliver Springs and Clinton Road where Downtown is now. But that was the only gravel road in this section and it hadn’t been gravel too many years. We used mostly churt that they dug out of the banks here in these roads. Instead of using ground crushed stone, they used mostly churt to build the road from Clinton to Oliver Springs.
Interviewer: Churt?
Mr. Copeland: Churt, that’s, it makes a very fine highway. It’s easily grated down. It’s a soft stone and made a very good surface. We were always glad to see a road made out of churt because it didn’t come full of chug holes like some of the ground limestone roads did.
Interviewer: Now, if someone traveled by horseback or by wagon would it be a twenty-four hour trip to go to Knoxville?
Mr. Copeland: To Knoxville yes, you had to take two days. You had to stay overnight if you went to Knoxville. Why, in fact you had almost stay overnight in car, it was a full two, two hour and half drive in a car and it was kind of strenuous and very few people went back, made the round trip, without staying all night. Of course we had a big house and we had five or six bedrooms and we always had a bed for everybody that came out. Of course we always had some hogs killed and put in the smokehouse and we had some meat, or we could kill a chicken. We always had something for the company when they came out.
Interviewer: You raised just about everything you ate?
Mr. Copeland: Most of the things we did we ate. We raised most of the things we ate. So did the neighbors.
Interviewer: How many were there in the family after everyone settled down?
Mr. Copeland: Well, at the time, there was originally nine people in our family, seven children and my mother and father but, only about, well I suspect there was only about seven of them really lived out here. I lived here part of the time and one of my brothers lived out here part of the time. One of my brothers married the next-door neighbor girl. He’s the one that had the store at Elza when the area moved in, when they built the stone house there. He married the Leith girl that lived on the farm next to us. They are still getting along fine. I suspect they, they have four children so they spread out quite a bit. None of them have stayed in Oak Ridge but they are all doing very well.
Interviewer: When did you meet your wife?
Mr. Copeland: I met my wife when I, after I traveled around awhile and I had a job with the Holland Furnace Company at the end of the Gay Street River Bridge. At that time I was working in Knoxville. I alternated back and forth. I’d farm awhile and work awhile. My wife was secretary to the Mr. Bondren at the Holland Furnace Company, and of course, she knows a good thing when she sees it so she immediately attached on. But anyway she’s been a mighty fine person.
Interviewer: Do you have children?
Mr. Copeland: We have three boys.
Interviewer: Where are they presently?
Mr. Copeland: Two of them are here in Oak Ridge. Both of them in the parts business and the other is in New Orleans. He works for the telephone company in New Orleans.
Interviewer: That’s my hometown.
Mr. Copeland: Is that right? New Orleans is a good time place.
Interviewer: When did you go into the automotive business?
Mr. Copeland: I expect it’s like every other business I’ve had. I drifted into the automobile business. I went into the parts business mainly in 1948 here in Oak Ridge, but even in the country store I had parts for automobiles. We had to carry parts for automobiles, and of course before Oak Ridge moved in, we had been here operating a country store for several years before Oak Ridge took the property over.
Interviewer: Well now was this the store at Elza?
Mr. Copeland: Yeah, I was at the store at Elza for three years. My brother owned that store and I was just renting the store from him, and then he wanted to re-enter business again and I moved down and bought Mrs. Locket’s store at Robertsville. That’s where the road turned off, the Clinton and Oliver Springs Road joined the Scarboro and the Knoxville Road.
Interviewer: So that’s where your store was?
Mr. Copeland: Yes that’s where my store was when the area came in. That’s where the Downtown section is now.
Interviewer: When did you open the store? Was it ten or so years before Oak Ridge became Oak Ridge?
Mr. Copeland: I only opened the store, I quit the farm in about 1932 and opened the store in Elza and stayed there three years and then I was still in the store business when the area, so it must have been about ten years. Our family was all born while I was in the store.
Interviewer: Mr. Copeland, how did they acquire your property when they first came in and started talking about taking over this area?
Mr. Copeland: They didn’t talk about taking it over. They just came down and looked around and knew what they were doing. When they got ready, they issued an “Order of Taking” and told us to get out of the property. I believe they gave us, of November the 15th they told us to move and I had a going store business at that time.
Interviewer: And what year was this?
Mr. Copeland: And told us to be out by December the 1st and we thought that meant what it said and that’s what we tried to do.
Interviewer: What year was this?
Mr. Copeland: It was 1942. That was in December. That’s when we moved out of in December the first of 1942.
Interviewer: Where did you move to then?
Mr. Copeland: I moved to Clinton. I bought a house and lot in Clinton. Property was rather hard to find for the people, because everyone here had to find a place to live somewhere, and they only had very few days to find one. The government didn’t show us very much consideration.
Interviewer: You had less than thirty days to vacate, right?
Mr. Copeland: Oh yes. No one had thirty days that I know of, most of them from the time they got their Order of Taking and knew what the government was going to do, the notices extended out over from 7 days to two to three weeks.
Interviewer: Were you given, monetarily, what you thought was the value of your property?
Mr. Copeland: No, I certainly didn’t because I had added a dwelling house to my property. I had paid, I’d built a four room house with running water in it and I had improved our house by adding a bathroom and put in running water and electricity. I’d improved the store building and I had a warehouse building and I still only was offered the same price when the government come in to take it over, that I had paid for in 1935. Prices had advanced quite rapidly since then and I got very little increase in mine from the court jury, because the government attorneys at that time, and our attorneys, couldn’t overcome it for some reason. I guess our attorneys maybe didn’t understand. But the judge instructed the jury that the government witnesses sense of values was right, and couldn’t take our sense of values of our witnesses because they weren’t accurate. The witnesses said they were interested witnesses, because they were people that lived here.
Interviewer: So in other words, more than likely most people only got whatever they had paid for their property?
Mr. Copeland: Well, some of them may have gotten a little more. Some of them didn’t get as much as they had paid for their property, not as much as they had put in it in their development that they had had. But most everybody, there wasn’t anyone satisfied with what the government paid them for their property. Oh we had one little lady up the, lived on the hill, Ms. Dicey, what was her last name, anyway she just had an acre and a little house, a little shack on it, an acre of ground and she had a shack and a little place to keep a horse or a cow, a little barn thing. True, it’s just an acre but it was her home and she had a home on it. They only gave her $75 for her total property there. Believe it or not. Wasn’t even enough to move the woman.
Interviewer: Did they help her move?
Mr. Copeland: They did not offer to help anyone move. That’s up to us entirely to do our moving, find our own place to live. We had no help in locating property either. TVA before had taken property up in the TVA section and at that time, TVA helped people find farms, help people, they assisted them in moving and did everything in the world they could to help them, but when they took over this property there’s no help offered nor given.
Interviewer: How did you receive notification?
Mr. Copeland: By letter. The man came around with an Order of Taking and told us when to move, and said that we had recourse to the courts and the money for the place was to be deposited in the court. And if we wanted to accept we could and that’s the only thing we had.
Interviewer: Did anyone that you know of balk at this and refused to move?
Mr. Copeland: Over 90% of people. We had a mass meeting at the Scarboro School at that time and I think the school building was just about full. We had people representing the government who attended and we all attended. I don’t believe there was hardly a family here that wasn’t represented and they were unanimous in telling the government that they weren’t treated right in purchasing the property. At that time they didn’t all have their values either. They didn’t know what they were going to be offered for their property.
Interviewer: Well after you knew that it was being used for a project though for the war, did you all change your mind a little bit about giving up your homes?
Mr. Copeland: That’s the only reason the people here gave up their homes as easy as they did, is because they thought it was war time and they thought they were doing their part in helping the war effort. Yes, it was taken over as a war effort.
Interviewer: You knew this…
Mr. Copeland: Yes, we didn’t know what it was going to be, but we knew that it was something concerning the defense of the country. And of course all these people had children and they had people in the army and they had people in the service and they didn’t want to do anything to harm their boys in the service. A lot of them wouldn’t have moved if it hadn’t been for the fact that it was wartime.
Interviewer: Okay so when did you come back into Oak Ridge with your business?
Mr. Copeland: I was out approximately from December 1st of ’42, till about March of ’44. I opened the East Village Service Station that the government had there. When I went to Clinton, I looked around for something to do and I went into the recapping business where the Don Chevrolet was. I rented a building there from Mr. Seeber, Mr. Pete, and put in a recapping shop and had a garage. We serviced most of the trucks and cars coming into Oak Ridge from the north at this place. We had the, we all were doing something to further the war effort. When I came back into the area in March to open the Esso service station in East Village.
Interviewer: What did you have to do? Did you have to get permission of the government as a civilian to do this?
Mr. Copeland: No the government asked me if I would come down and give them a bid on it and operate it. At first I didn’t pay much attention to it ‘cause I had all I could do and they had these bids out for lease. They called me one Saturday morning and says, “Aren’t you coming to give us a bid on this?” And I said, “Well just haven’t had time.” And they said “Well, give me some kind of a figure.” And I pulled a figure out of the air and gave it to them and they called me up in about an hour and said, “It’s yours.” So that’s the way I got my first contract.
Interviewer: You could sort of care less.
Mr. Copeland: Yes because we all had all we could do at that time.
Interviewer: I want to go back a little bit and ask you something about the school when you were living, you know when you’d moved from your brother’s store and opened your own store and you remodeled your home and all. Were your children of school age at that time?
Mr. Copeland: Well, my youngest son didn’t enter school until about 19… I guess he went to the first grade at Scarboro, I mean the oldest son, yes, that would have been when Scarboro was first built. The first year that Scarboro School was built which would have been, I expect, ’39, I guess.
Interviewer: Now Scarboro was out toward UT Farm?
Mr. Copeland: Yes, that’s right. Scarboro’s where the UT Farm is, that building there is where some of the offices are, was the new building that the WPA built to house the grammar schools for this section.
Interviewer: So that was quite some distance for the children to travel?
Mr. Copeland: Well it was three miles, but they came from further than that because they came from Batley and everywhere and everybody in this section went to that grammar school by way of school bus.
Interviewer: And what was the school bus?
Mr. Copeland: Well they had several school buses. Most of them were private; you know they were private contractors that hauled children.
Interviewer: Were they actual cars or wagons?
Mr. Copeland: No they were real buses. When we first came to this section most of them were school wagons, they’d pull with a team of mules, team of horses. It was a kind of four or five seated pack we called it, pulled by two horses and it was pretty hard going. They’d, but they went to Robertsville from here at that time. From where our farm was, the people that were driving the school bus would turn around at our place. It was quite a trip down to Robertsville for the school children at that time. That was when Robertsville first became a high school, they were still most of them coming in just the old homemade trucks, and they’d done away with the horses by that time, but they were still using old homemade trucks with homemade beds built on them for school buses.
Interviewer: What year was this approximately?
Mr. Copeland: Approximately 1920-…well I can’t remember much about it ‘till about 1922 or ‘23 when I actually came out here but the wagons started, I think the last wagon was operated by about 1925 or ‘6, they operated the last wagon.
Interviewer: Where did you all go to church, Mr. Copeland?
Mr. Copeland: Well, there was quite a few small churches. The place that our folks went to church was, there was a little independent church at Lupton, that’s about two miles from where the Marina is now. There was a little road there past times that went across from the Emory Valley Road over to the Clinton and Oliver Springs road. There was a little schoolhouse building that had been turned into a church that was called Lupton and Lupton’s Crossroads. But there was two churches just north on the Clinton Oliver Springs Road at that time, one was a Methodist and one was a, you know, I don’t remember exactly the denomination of the other. Of course there was a good Baptist church at East Fork and there was a good Baptist church that we called New Hope. There was a, and there was a Presbyterian church and a Baptist church in Scarboro. We had churches. These people were church going people. They had churches when they didn’t have schools.
Interviewer: Now you’re talking about in the early 20’s?
Mr. Copeland: Yes, in the early 20’s, yes m’am. And of course the churches were about the same all, they used, only about two or three of the churches had a full time pastor. But we were all well represented with the Methodist and Baptist and Presbyterian.
Interviewer: Did most of them have pastors who went from church to church?
Mr. Copeland: Yes most of them had a pastor that had more than one church, usually had about three, a circuit of churches, most of them did. The, I guess the Solway Church, I guess New Hope Church had the, first church that had a regular pastor, full time pastor.
Interviewer: What did the young people do for entertainment?
Mr. Copeland: Oh, I know what we did down at our house. We had the time of our lives. We fished and hunted in the summer time. We sat on the riverbanks over the weekend. We worked through the week, and occasionally some of the people would have a, what we, someone would ride around on horseback, and when someone would decide to have a dance at some of the homes somewhere, and they would cover each valley and somebody would go on horseback to make the invitations and so they’d usually be pretty well attended. We usually had local fiddle music and I remember, there was some very good square dancers in this section, I’ll tell you. That’s about the only entertainment they did as a community.
Interviewer: How many quilting bees and barn raising…
Mr. Copeland: Not that I know of here. That was a little bit before my time. We had box suppers sometimes and things like that to raise money to run the churches on and we’d have ice cream suppers. I know when we built the little Presbyterian mission at Elza, that was what they use to call the, oh what did they call it here, the…community house was a little, that was right in East Village, I forgot what they called it, but you have the records of that. But I helped build that church. The Presbyterian mission board gave us a grant from some lady in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and this money was applied to start the church. Some people donated lumber and some people donated labor. I was a country merchant down there and I had the responsibility mostly of digging some money out of all the people that would give any and all of them were pretty liberal considering how much money they had. We had an old gristmill where we first started our first Sunday school services there. And we had a missionary from the Presbyterian Church in Knoxville and he’d come out and hold Sunday school when the church was organized. They sent us a preacher for part of the Sundays. I think that was their mission, their preachers that were trainee preachers. I remember we had a, we needed a piano after we got our church built, and we needed benches and we needed a lot of things. We had an ice cream supper one night at the, on the church lawn to introduce the people to the church and that was about as successful a financial arrangement we could have. We only bought twenty gallons of ice cream. We had Sani Seal to ship it out to us on the train and it was unloaded at Elza. That’s the only way we could get ice cream in those days though packed in ice of course. So we built our little frame around the twenty gallons of ice cream and we made lemonade and that’s all we had to sell was lemonade and ice cream. But you know that little party raised over a hundred dollars for this church. We must have cut those ice cream cones awful small. I’d hate to tell you how we made some of the lemonade because we didn’t have any water up there, but we got water somewhere.
Interviewer: Was this what is called the Chapel on the Hill now?
Mr. Copeland: No that was, what, that was the church that was originally at the corner of, Arkansas House. It was on the corner of Arkansas Avenue. You remember the Arkansas House. It’s been torn down now, yes but it did go all through the area. It wasn’t torn down until after Oak Ridge. You remember the Arkansas House.
Interviewer: Oh, I remember it. There used to be some flat tops…
Mr. Copeland: Yes, and so many of the church groups started in the Arkansas House. Yes, they built flat tops all around it. It was on the corner of the Turnpike and the Arkansas House.
Interviewer: It’s right across from what station now?
Mr. Copeland: Well, it’d be the East Village Service Station, yes.
Interviewer: Is that where it was?
Mr. Copeland: Yes, that’s East Village Shell, that was where my station was, right in back of that where the old station was, that was the East Village Esso Station.
Interviewer: Where did you go from there? How long did you run, operate that station and then what did you do?
Mr. Copeland: I operated that station in, I expect I didn’t sell that station until 1950 to ’51. I guess it was, when I had, in the meantime I had opened a Woodridge Home and Auto Supply Store and a parts house in the Fall of ’48 in the old Municipal Market Building where they had moved out some of the, the government had had a storehouse there, and a dining room and a lot of other things but that’s, so they cut it up in storage and rented it. That was for where the original, that’s before Downtown took. What was the name of that shopping center, I guess that was the market, Municipal Market, yeah.
Interviewer: On the site of the now Downtown?
Mr. Copeland: Yes. That was on the site where the Texaco station is and the bowling alley and that was the original site of the, so there were several stores, that was cut up and made into several stores. When they took that over then there were stores open in Grove Center so’s I rented a place over there from Roane Anderson. So we always had a place to do business.
Interviewer: You had to move a little bit to do it but…
Mr. Copeland: Yes we moved a lot, several times.
Interviewer: What were your feelings when you heard about the bomb?
Mr. Copeland: I was, kind of had a feeling that perhaps we had done some good in Oak Ridge. I had had a suspicion that they were trying to split the atom here, when we first moved out of Oak Ridge, because one of my friends at Sunday School at the First Methodist Church in Clinton had told us that they were pretty sure they were going to try to split the atom here in Oak Ridge. That’s what he had heard. We didn’t know they were trying to make a bomb out of it. But the, with all the secrecy there was around, we knew it had to be something big. So when the news broke, why everybody was quite, they were pleased that they had had an opportunity to be a part of the, such a thing as building an atomic bomb. However we weren’t proud of the bomb at all, but I think they all were glad that it would have some effect on the war.
Interviewer: Glad it was us and not the Germans who developed it.
Mr. Copeland: That’s right.
Interviewer: When the news broke, did they announce that this had been developed in the Oak Ridge complex?
Mr. Copeland: It wasn’t called Oak Ridge then. It was getting to be called that but, yes, they said that the, they gave Oak Ridge credit for developing the atom bomb, yes ma’m. I made a trip not long after that, to Detroit to visit some friends there, some folks up there and do some purchasing. I always carried some book matches and it had my business address on it, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and it was quite a souvenir up there, to get something from Oak Ridge for those people in Detroit, so that and everywhere we’d travel, people had heard about Oak Ridge.
Interviewer: Mr. Copeland when you first start, with the war effort became so great down here, did ya’ll have any trouble getting any supplies and things you needed to sell? How did you get your stuff to sell?
Mr. Copeland: Well we had to call on the Army to help us with priorities which they gladly did. We didn’t get enough rubber, we had recapping…[end of tape]
[Side 2- Flip tape now – rest of this side is blank.]
Mr. Copeland: Oh yes, talking about supplies. I don’t think anyone in Oak Ridge obtained the amount of things they needed to sell. It was very hard anywhere to get, however Oak Ridgers got more stuff than anybody else did. Now we didn’t get one tire out of a hundred that we could sell, but we did have a franchise with BF Goodrich Company and we got the, when the tires were rationed, we had only had a very small stock of tires. I turned my tires in from the country store and that’s the only tires that I was entitled to. We only carried about 15 or 20 tires in the country store, so they only issued me about 15 or 20 certificates. So we, the government let us buy certificates from other people and places, so’s I bought for a dollar a piece. I bought certificates that was legal from Washington D.C. and places like that where they had more tire certificates than they had tires. From that I managed to buy tires all over the country wherever I could buy them. Of course gasoline wasn’t a problem, they furnished us with gasoline. Our ration boards here were a little more liberal in, with the ration stamps than they were most places and there were more liberal with tires, because the people had to get to work and they had to travel to get work and the only way they could get here was on either the buses that private operators were operating, or in their own vehicle. Of course, everybody had a ride club and more than one person rode in every car. In fact most cars were filled with passengers. But it wasn’t too awfully bad. I personally, I wasn’t short of anything because always some friend was giving me something and doing something for me. I don’t know how that came about but we always had some. I had some of the best meat in my life when the war was going on because Roane Anderson had bought cattle and brought in here and killed them and slaughtered cattle. We got the best beef that they got anywhere in the country. I wish I could get some good beef like that now.
Interviewer: Did they sell it to the public or to the stores?
Mr. Copeland: Well they sold through the stores, through each, the community stores were the biggest group of stores. HG Hackney Company, people had the community stores. You had one in East Village and one on top of the hill at, well that wasn’t finished in fact, but it had one in Grove Center and they had one down at K-25, they had three or four and then of course the A&P came into Jackson Square which was a great bonanza. I think they sold their entire stock about every Saturday night. You’d go by their window and their shelves would be empty. But I don’t think we all suffered very much. We had more than we’d been used to.
Interviewer: And possibly more than other cities.
Mr. Copeland: I’m sure we had more than they did in other places.
Interviewer: Can you tell us about some of the people that were your friends when you were a young man before we had Oak Ridge even thought of?
Mr. Copeland: I believe you asked me about the old gentleman in the short sleeves that was sitting on the front of the store there in the picture that we had made just before we left Oak Ridge. His name was, he was a Baptist preacher and he had lost both of his arms, both of his hands, they were off above the wrist. He lived just a short distance above the store, but he was one of the best old gentlemen I ever knew, I guess. His oldest daughter, Stella, she was a, she worked for the superintendent of schools at the time they took this area over. He had two more daughters that were teachers in the high schools. One of the boys was Frank Hightower who lived down in East Fork Valley, and he had another boy that worked at the airport in Knoxville but his wife is still living. She is about 100 years old, her name is Molly and she lives with her oldest daughter, Mrs. Reed in Clinton. She was a great old person until of course the last few years I think, she doesn’t know anything, she doesn’t know anybody, her mind isn’t good; she’s in good health but her mind isn’t too good, but she was a wonderful person. Most everybody in this country except the Copelands I guess were kin to about everybody else. I had to be awfully careful, ‘cause I was a stranger, we were strangers in this part of the country. We came from somewhere else and most everybody was born and raised here.
Interviewer: You were new blood coming in. What happened to your family’s farm? Did they keep it until the government moved in?
Mr. Copeland: Yeah, well my dad had sold half of the farm just a year or two before the government came in. And he sold it rather cheap ‘cause my Dad had had, he was getting old and wasn’t able to run the farm. Times were pretty hard. He had sold half the farm at a pretty low price and built him a new house across the road. That was one thing that threw the values, there wasn’t very many sales that they had to go by, down here, and that was one thing that knocked these prices of this land down, because that was only one of the few places they had to go by. Anybody that had sold land or anything in this part of the country in the five or ten years before that, had sold it because they had to, because it was sold at very low prices.
Interviewer: Land was valued not only just monetarily but it’s something to own.
Mr. Copeland: That’s right. Land was something to own and it wasn’t. We didn’t realize how, we couldn’t place a dollar and cents value on our land because that was our homes and our farms. Of course about half the people down here had a child or themselves that worked at the Magnet Mills in Clinton you know, which gave us, or they some of them worked at the coal mines and traveled back and forth to Beech Grove, Beech Fork, and Fork Mountain to mine coal and some as far as Caryville from here at that time. But I guess the Magnet Mills was the biggest source of cash that we had for the people that owned the property around here.
Interviewer: That was in the early 1920’s when that was operated?
Mr. Copeland: Yes, in the ‘20s to ’25 or ’30 Magnet Mills was quite a thing. That was the most important source of income in Anderson County outside of coal mining.
Interviewer: In other words if you wanted to supplement your farming income that’s what you did more than likely?
Mr. Copeland: Yes, some of the girls worked at the mill or their mothers or something. I know the best, anybody, anytime I could get an account at the store, that worked at the mill, that was my bread and butter because they always paid their bill every week when the payday came around.
Interviewer: Did you otherwise run up pretty good tabs on people or charge accounts?
Mr. Copeland: Yes, we did our best to serve them as much as we could however we didn’t have any yearly accounts like most of the old people did. Of course between the railroad after, there was quite a few railroaders that had lived around here two or three, three or four families and I remember when they went off of the railroad pension, it was several months before the railroad could get their pension, and we’d carry these people but they were all very fine about it. Everybody paid me, so they didn’t have to worry about that.
Interviewer: Didn’t have to worry like you do now about people.
Mr. Copeland: Yeah I had people, I had more people for a time down there that wouldn’t pay than I do now, I’m sure. Of course I was a little bit, I was a little easier to give credit but I, it was awful. You always have people that won’t pay you, any community or any place however you knew about them. Everybody knew who wouldn’t pay and who would pay, so it wasn’t very much of a problem if you just asked somebody. They’d tell you whether they’d pay you or not.
Interviewer: It was your fault if you didn’t know.
Mr. Copeland: That’s right. [break in tape] Oak Ridge is one of the finest places to live I think you could imagine. It has good churches. It has a variety of people. It has the best schools in the state of Tennessee and we have the finest people. Since they come from all over the country there’s not any one part of the country that rules Oak Ridge. The conglomeration of the whole United States it looks like and I’ve enjoyed knowing most of them. Most of them are kind people.
Interviewer: Mr. Copeland, kids have always broken arms and legs, what did you do before Oak Ridge for a doctor?
Mr. Copeland: Well my wife had one of those breaking leg deals but we were running the country store and she stepped up on my boy’s old rattle trap truck to get her a peach and stepped down and as she stepped down, she trailed her foot and broke both bones just above the ankle. I was working for TVA at that time. I’d just gotten this job a little while before. We had the first income that was more than we needed to live on in our life at that time and she was operating the country store while I worked in daytime and of course I operated the store at night. When she broke these two legs that put her out of business and I had to quit my truck driving when she had, she only broke one leg but two bones in one leg. So we carried the poor girl into the house next door where my brother lived and called the doctor from Clinton and he came down and…
Interviewer: Was it Dr. Taylor?
Mr. Copeland: No, Dr. Jennings. He was killed later up there in an automobile accident in Clinton. But the bone was sticking out there in her leg so we proceeded to, the neighbors and boy, we proceeded with the doctor’s help, to pull the bones back in place. Then we took her over to Knoxville to the Howard Henderson Hospital, I guess at that time, in the car and where they X-rayed it, Dr. Henderson X-rayed it, and put the cast on it the next day. But he didn’t have to do anything to it as far as setting the leg’s concerned. The country doctor did as good as job as, there was nothing done about it except just put the cast on.
Interviewer: Was this in the mid ‘40’s or late ‘40’s or something like that?
Mr. Copeland: No that was earlier than that. That was about the early ‘30’s in the 1933 I guess, or ’34 when TVA first, had first started building Norris Dam. See they had to hire a lot of trucks and things to haul timbers and things like that in to build the town of Norris. We all could get jobs at that time.
Interviewer: And you had telephone service throughout here?
Mr. Copeland: Well at the time there was not any telephones. Mr. Cross just across the river, just above the railroad where, they had the only phone in this local section until you got down as far as, there was not anymore phones from Mr. Cross’s place down. Who had a phone down here through Oliver Springs?
[Third voice in the distance-unable to distinguish]
Mr. Copeland: Well, yeah, but that was later. We had some telephone service but it wasn’t very good. I know when we first came out here from Knox County, my dad still was an official over there in the courthouse, so’s he almost had to have a phone, so we had two phone companies. There was a new and the old phone companies. Peoples Telephone Company and The Coalman Telephone Company. It was seven miles over to Scarboro but it was only about three miles, two miles and a half where we could hit some more poles. So we built two miles and a half of poles and there was two phones, us and the next door, and the people lived next door put a telephone in and we run the line over to Scarboro, that was… And we had to run our own line and service our own line. So it was down about half the time, every time a storm would come, why the line would get blown down.
Interviewer: What kind of wire did you use?
Mr. Copeland: Well we used regular telephone wire and insulators. They were pretty far apart the phone was, ‘cause we only had the one line going. That’s the way we had communication then, but this telephone company went out of business in just a year or two, two or three years I guess it was, so it was about 19-, it didn’t do us any good for very many years. At Elza Mr. Cross had the only phone that was connected to Clinton and so’s that, where we everybody used his telephone.
Interviewer: Is that where you called the doctor?
Mr. Copeland: Yes. If our little baby got sick in the night, at 12 o’clock at night, we went up and woke Mr. Cross up and they always got up with a smile. You used the phone and the doctor came down at that time of night. Funniest thing, I know our oldest son, we’d been away somewhere for the day. We had an old Ford Coupe. We’d been out somewhere and came back. We’d given him a sandwich and it had a pickle on it and he was just a little bitty fellow so’s he ate the pickle and all, but about 10 or 11 o’clock he kept getting sicker and sicker. He had a tremendously high fever. So we were a young couple and so we were scared to death. At 11 o’clock I went up to Mr. Cross’s and called Dr. Hall from Clinton. He got up out of bed and came down. By the time Dr. Hall come down the boy had vomited and lost his pickle and stuff and he didn’t have a bit of temperature or nothing else and he was perfectly quiet. And here the doctor came in and the boy wasn’t even sick.
Interviewer: And that was a long trip from Clinton?
Mr. Copeland: Yes it was. But the doctor certainly, he just smiled about it. He never did fuss at me for calling him like that, said that’s what he’s for - to call.
Interviewer: Who were some of your other neighbors when you lived in the Robertsville area? Mr. Copeland: Well, the people lived next door to me were the Pecks, and the Roberts across the street from the Pecks that owned where the high school is, the Roberts and Pecks, Pecks on one side and Roberts on the other. And back going toward Scarboro was the Clyde Peak Farm and up, we had a lot of neighbors. We had the Grubbs and the oh, let me see, what’s the little Thornton girl’s….yeah well, we had Roger Irwin and Glen Irwin and…
Interviewer: Raines.
Mr. Copeland: Yes, the Raines do you remember the Raines? Yeah they lived at Elza. They were neighbors right close to the store at Elza. They had quite a large family. I guess most of his family’s born there at Elza. Virgil Raines run the, he had charge of the state road between, I guess his territory covered all this end. He had a grader, that’s the only way with a gravel road, you had to keep a grader on it constantly or it would get full of holes and it’d be impassable. That was Virgil’s job. He had a pretty good job. He had one of the better jobs in the country. But…
Interviewer: What about the Pyatts, did they live close to you?
Mr. Copeland: Yes the Pyatts were one of the, they were part of the pillars of the community. Mr. John Pyatt was always a member of the county court. He was always the squire and he was executor of about everybody’s estate, about everybody’s will. When anybody died, why Mr. Pyatt, Mr. John, was the executor of their will, he was one of the important people of the community. Of course the Pyatts and the Hightowers were all related. Everybody was related to each other. The Garrisons and the Tolsons. Clara Pyatt, she married one of the Pyatt boys and Bill Parton run Mr. Clyde Peak’s farm and we had the Jenkins that lived on down below him. Where Glen Irwin lived that was originally farm belonging to one of the older, some of the older regional people in this section by the name of Peak, not Peak but, I’m trying to think of the old man, Kincaid. And Bob Kincaid’s folks, what was the man’s name that owned the farm down here that Glen Irwin bought from? His name was, oh… you know as we get older we forget a lot of these names until someone calls them for us.
Interviewer: It’s amazing that you had so many of them.
Mr. Copeland: Well I knew every family in here from Wheat to Clinton. Some time or other some of them stopped at our store and we had, I know one of our doctor’s here in Oak Ridge, his father was the first principal of the Robertsville High School, Dr. Hendrix. His father’s is still, still a great professor but he was one of the finest professors that we ever had, one of the finest principals that we’ve ever had of our high school. He was the first high school principal that we had I think here. Mr. Cross lived across the river, one of our dentists, Charles Cross was his grandson. He used to come to the store with his grandpa and he’d ride in front of the horse when he was just a little bitty fellow and he still remembers. He always did remember us.
Interviewer: Did a family called the Gambles settle in Gamble Valley and is that why it has its name today?
Mr. Copeland: Yes that’s exactly why the Gamble Valley is called that, because there were quite a few families of Gambles lived down there. A man John Gamble was the head of the clan and there was, divided up into brothers and sisters and sons and daughters, and there was I expect, there was four or five different families of Gambles down there. By the way, they could make the best molasses that I believe I have ever eaten. Anytime you get Charlie Gamble molasses you could always get a dollar a gallon for them. The only thing was getting Charlie to sell you enough molasses. Mr. Pyatt also made molasses but Charlie Gamble’s molasses was the one that was in big demand. They, Mr. Pyatt made molasses. They had the Bonnie and Bonnie Pyatt and Ralph Pyatt. Ralph Pyatt works for the schools now and Bonnie worked for one of the service stations there in Clinton. But they made molasses each fall and everybody brought their cane to that, pale mostly, but anytime Mr. Charlie Gamble had molasses it was always the choice molasses.
Interviewer: Is this the Gamble family that has the funeral home in Clinton?
Mr. Copeland: They are distant relations. No that’s a different family but they were related, yes ma’m.
Interviewer: I think the Gambles have again, when they settled in Clinton or outside of Clinton, they settled in one area.
Mr. Copeland: Now we had another family of Gambles that lived just about where, well, right across the street from the Reeder Motor Company, right in that section. And there’s a little Gamble graveyard right there close by, at the, that was still another family of Gambles but they did move to Clinton, that was Laura Gamble and some of the Gambles that moved to Clinton.
Interviewer: And that’s their graveyard that private place.
Mr. Copeland: There’s a little graveyard that belonged to the Gambles, was on the Gamble’s farm, yes.
Interviewer: Did different farms, like you mentioned the Gamble’s, seem to specialize in molasses, did other families sort of have specialties that if you sort of looked forward to?
Mr. Copeland: I expect you would call it that. I know some people could raise better tobacco than others, and some people raised better cattle. When our farm, my dad raised mostly corn and ‘bout everybody on the river bottom. I think that’s about all we knew to raise on those bottoms that would give us a cash crop. People would come all winter long to my dad’s crib to get corn. Most of the time it was bought in the ear and they would shuck it themselves and take it to the gristmill, 15-20 bushels at a time they could haul in their wagons. And they would come and sometimes they would have the money to pay for it and sometimes Dad would have to sell it to them on credit, but he always had corn for a man that came after corn.
Interviewer: Do you remember how much it was a bushel?
Mr. Copeland: Yes I sure do. I know, I’m not going to tell you about the time it’s 38 cents a bushel. That was when I raised corn. Most of the time corn was a dollar a bushel and one time right after World War One when we first, the corn was as high as $2 a bushel, but it was a dollar a bushel most of the time from that until about 1930-’31, it dropped down to almost nothing. I know the year, my first corn crop was raised in 1932, and my wife and I sat in the crib all winter shucking 3,000 bushel of corn but we never got over 38 cents a bushel for any of it and we had shuck and shell all of that. They didn’t buy it in the ear.
Interviewer: Where was the nearest gristmill?
Mr. Copeland: There was one at Elza and then there was a gristmill at, down where the store complex that I bought from Mrs. Lockett. They had a gristmill there. Mr. McWayne run the gristmill there and it was situated right in the corner where Emory Valley Road turned up from the Clinton Highway Road which was just about, oh it’s still in the same neighbor as all of Robertsville was. But he could grind, he made good meal. He knew how to run his, how to keep his rock sharp and of course he used a gasoline engine. We didn’t use a water wheel there, but he always knew how to keep his rock sharp and made good meal. He didn’t burn his meal up like some of them did.
Interviewer: Is this the Mr. McWayne that lives in Clinton now? Or above Clinton?
Mr. Copeland: Yes, well he lives, both of the men are dead now that run that mill, but they did live in Clinton. His wife lives on Main Street just as you enter Clinton. He and his wife lives, he was the operator, one of the operators at the mill, he and Henry and his wife live over at on the at Sulfur Springs on the Oak Ridge Road.
Interviewer: I’m going to have to interview those two people.
Mr. Copeland: Oh they, I guess Georgie could tell you more than I could. Now the Ms. Carter at the, that lives right at the foot of the hill as you turn up to on 61 where it turns off, the little house in the hollow there, Ms Roxie Carter could tell you more than I could ever tell you, because she lived here before we did. She was a Hendrix and she knew everybody in this country, her mother did especially. Her mother’s one of the finest people I ever knew. Her name was, mother lived right straight on top of the hill above where, well back on Viking Road, up that road. Well, if you get in touch with --?Euricus?-- Cross he will tell you where his sister Lillian can be located. I believe Lillian will remember more than most anyone about this section because Lillian knew everybody and she always kept contact with everyone. --?Euricus?-- Cross, tell you about that name. --?Euricus?-- was one side of the family and the Cross the other. The Cross that, was one of the Cross’ who owned the farm where my father bought, when he first come here. The name --?Euricus?-- was the --?Euricus’?-- that lived, owned all the property from, oh just a little below where the Gambles lived on down to about, almost about half way up and down from Elza to Robertsville, and they owned the property all the way back almost to the top of the Ridge where we have all the houses built now. That was the Euricus, Mrs. Euricus was a wonderful character. She lived to be about 85 or 87 years old and she was strong right up I think about as long as she lived. Her, Sally Cross was Euricus Cross’ mother and she just passed away about a year ago. Now she could sure tell you about everybody. She was one of the finest square dancers I’ve ever known. Even though she was in two car wrecks and got run over up on the road and got all of her bones broken, she still would heal up and come back and be ready to dance the next dance that would come along. She was really a, really a tough character. I mean physically, not, she was a fine person.
Interviewer: Was she kin to the Shinlevers in Clinton?
Mr. Copeland: The Shinlevers were, they married the, I don’t know whether Cross was related to the Shinlevers or not. The Shinlevers are the people that took picture that I had in the paper, but one of the Shinlevers married into the family that lived down on the river, down where the park is now, where the Carbide Park is on that part of property. That was, their name was, wasn’t Diggs was it? Well, the Diggs lived there and the, well one of the Diggs married Shinlever. Yes, I’m sure they did. They have that property. The Blacks lived right across the river from the farm where the Marina is. That was John Black and one of their families was Mr. Oscar Tunnell, Tunnell they called it at that time. Mr. Oscar Tunnell would ride his horse up to our farm and cross the river there and leave his horse in the stable. It’s about the only way when we first came out here, that he had to visit his sister over at Black’s farm. Now he had a mortgage on about every farm in Anderson County I guess. He was President of the Tri County National Bank at Oliver Springs and he was also an uncle to our present attorney here in Oak Ridge, Lawrence Tunnell but he was an uncle to Lawrence. He owned about, I guess he had more money. He always had cash money for somebody to loan. I think he did more private loaning for himself than he did for the bank.
Interviewer: What sort of loans could you get on property? Say you were buying a 300 acre farm, would you have to have a certain percent cash down or..?
Mr. Copeland: Yes it was, well you didn’t have the opportunity to borrow money in those days like you do now. You, the farm, the federal government had a farm loan office and I think its still in existence. It used to be headquartered in Kentucky but that was about the best place to get a good farm loan or from some of the insurance companies. The local banks would give you a loan on some farms but most farms were bought through borrowed money from the bank or from some insurance company.
Interviewer: Did you have monthly payments or an annual payment?
Mr. Copeland: No there were mostly annually payments in those days. They didn’t have many monthly payments. Annual payments could be made, or semi-annual payments could be made much better than monthly payments could be made.
Interviewer: Would you have to have say 50% down back then to buy a farm?
Mr. Copeland: At least that, yes, most the time, 33 1/3 was the very minimum you had to have. You had to have that at least 33 1/3% down to buy a house or a farm either one before we had the help that we have now from the government. But we got along fine doing it. You could always get a down payment down for something.
Interviewer: Mr. Copeland thank you a lot for letting us come to your home and interview you and your wife and you come down at the library and listen to this tape. It’ll be on record down there at the archives.
Mr. Copeland: It’s sure been a pleasure to talk to both of you and I believe you folks have done enough investigating around here; I believe you know more about the people than I do.
Interviewer: We hope so. We’ll learn a lot more. Thank you very much.
Transcribed: June 2005
Typed by LB

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ORAL HISTORY OF NASH COPELAND
May 23, 1972
At the home of Mr. & Mrs. J. Nash Copeland
Interviewer: Today is May 23, 1972 and we’re at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Nash Copeland. We’ll start off with asking Mr. Copeland when he came to the now Oak Ridge area.
Mr. Copeland: I came to this area in, my family originally bought the farm where the Marina now is in the year 1919 from the Cross family, but at that time I was in school in Knox County. My father was one of the county officials there. He was Register of Deeds of Knox County and we lived at Inskip. So we didn’t move down here officially until about 1922, but I didn’t come and follow the family until after I graduated from school in 1923. In fact it was almost 1924 before I got here because I was working in Knoxville and kept my job there after I got out of school. The people from Knoxville thought this was a very far away place because it took an overnight trip. It wasn’t coming back, it wasn’t come and go in one day, it almost had to be an overnight trip. One of the boys that was courting one of my sisters is about the first person down here that made an overnight trip in a T Model Ford at that time. I expect we were one of the first people who brought cars over the road from Edgemoor to Elzy (Elza). She’ll ask you the question, what you want to know, I’ll try to answer them for you.
Interviewer: Okay, what did you do when you finally moved to this area? Did you move into the farmhouse with your family? And did you all farm or what did you do?
Mr. Copeland: Yes, our total living was made from farming. We did most of our farming with mules and horses. My dad was a kind of a farmer that believed in walking. He didn’t believe in doing farming the easy way, ‘cause we had to plow those bottoms with the walking plow while our neighbors was using riding plows. I never will forget that.
Interviewer: What were the boundaries of your farm? Can you tell us?
Mr. Copeland: Well, from the present boundaries, our land run from the top of Pilot Knob or that’s the ridge to the north, over to the top of the ridge on the south side. Our line went from the top of one ridge to the other and straight down to the river. So we had a little over a mile of river bottom banks there. We only extended up the valley about half a mile to join the Wright farm. Theirs was the next farm up above us. It was approximately about six hundred acres including the ridge land in the boundaries of the farm. However most of it, a lot of it was not farmable, it was just mostly timberland. Had some very fine timber on the farm at that time.
Interviewer: Did you have a place to buy your staples and clothing? Was there a store near by?
Mr. Copeland: The only thing you could buy would have been a little tobacco, fat back, a little sugar or something like that at a little store in Elza, that’s straight up the river from where the original first Elza Gate was. The man had a store right there along the highway, a Mr. Hill and that was about half a mile below the Elza railroad station. But most of our purchases had to be made in Knoxville and hauled to this part of the country.
Interviewer: Would one person go and shop for all the neighbors once a week or…?
Mr. Copeland: Well, not all the neighbors. We did kind of keep things for our farm, the hands that worked on the farm. But no, each person done their own individual shopping because there wasn’t very much money left to shop with. We didn’t have much money to do any shopping with.
Interviewer: But now you all had cars to go to Knoxville in at this time?
Mr. Copeland: Very few people had cars at that time. We had an old Hupmobile and one of the neighbors, Mr. Jack Grubb, he lived about two miles up the road just above where the rehabilitation, in fact that’s part of his farm, he had an old car but that was the only two cars in the valley right at that time. Everybody else either used horses or mules or horse and buggy.
Interviewer: And that would take them quite a bit longer I’d suspect?
Mr. Copeland: Well they didn’t, in fact we had to use the horse and buggy in the wintertime, we certainly couldn’t use a car. There was no gravel on any of the roads out here. The only road that was gravel was the one running from Clinton to Oliver Springs. Of course the Edgemoor Road was gravel from Edgemoor to Scarboro and it came into the Oliver Springs and Clinton Road where Downtown is now. But that was the only gravel road in this section and it hadn’t been gravel too many years. We used mostly churt that they dug out of the banks here in these roads. Instead of using ground crushed stone, they used mostly churt to build the road from Clinton to Oliver Springs.
Interviewer: Churt?
Mr. Copeland: Churt, that’s, it makes a very fine highway. It’s easily grated down. It’s a soft stone and made a very good surface. We were always glad to see a road made out of churt because it didn’t come full of chug holes like some of the ground limestone roads did.
Interviewer: Now, if someone traveled by horseback or by wagon would it be a twenty-four hour trip to go to Knoxville?
Mr. Copeland: To Knoxville yes, you had to take two days. You had to stay overnight if you went to Knoxville. Why, in fact you had almost stay overnight in car, it was a full two, two hour and half drive in a car and it was kind of strenuous and very few people went back, made the round trip, without staying all night. Of course we had a big house and we had five or six bedrooms and we always had a bed for everybody that came out. Of course we always had some hogs killed and put in the smokehouse and we had some meat, or we could kill a chicken. We always had something for the company when they came out.
Interviewer: You raised just about everything you ate?
Mr. Copeland: Most of the things we did we ate. We raised most of the things we ate. So did the neighbors.
Interviewer: How many were there in the family after everyone settled down?
Mr. Copeland: Well, at the time, there was originally nine people in our family, seven children and my mother and father but, only about, well I suspect there was only about seven of them really lived out here. I lived here part of the time and one of my brothers lived out here part of the time. One of my brothers married the next-door neighbor girl. He’s the one that had the store at Elza when the area moved in, when they built the stone house there. He married the Leith girl that lived on the farm next to us. They are still getting along fine. I suspect they, they have four children so they spread out quite a bit. None of them have stayed in Oak Ridge but they are all doing very well.
Interviewer: When did you meet your wife?
Mr. Copeland: I met my wife when I, after I traveled around awhile and I had a job with the Holland Furnace Company at the end of the Gay Street River Bridge. At that time I was working in Knoxville. I alternated back and forth. I’d farm awhile and work awhile. My wife was secretary to the Mr. Bondren at the Holland Furnace Company, and of course, she knows a good thing when she sees it so she immediately attached on. But anyway she’s been a mighty fine person.
Interviewer: Do you have children?
Mr. Copeland: We have three boys.
Interviewer: Where are they presently?
Mr. Copeland: Two of them are here in Oak Ridge. Both of them in the parts business and the other is in New Orleans. He works for the telephone company in New Orleans.
Interviewer: That’s my hometown.
Mr. Copeland: Is that right? New Orleans is a good time place.
Interviewer: When did you go into the automotive business?
Mr. Copeland: I expect it’s like every other business I’ve had. I drifted into the automobile business. I went into the parts business mainly in 1948 here in Oak Ridge, but even in the country store I had parts for automobiles. We had to carry parts for automobiles, and of course before Oak Ridge moved in, we had been here operating a country store for several years before Oak Ridge took the property over.
Interviewer: Well now was this the store at Elza?
Mr. Copeland: Yeah, I was at the store at Elza for three years. My brother owned that store and I was just renting the store from him, and then he wanted to re-enter business again and I moved down and bought Mrs. Locket’s store at Robertsville. That’s where the road turned off, the Clinton and Oliver Springs Road joined the Scarboro and the Knoxville Road.
Interviewer: So that’s where your store was?
Mr. Copeland: Yes that’s where my store was when the area came in. That’s where the Downtown section is now.
Interviewer: When did you open the store? Was it ten or so years before Oak Ridge became Oak Ridge?
Mr. Copeland: I only opened the store, I quit the farm in about 1932 and opened the store in Elza and stayed there three years and then I was still in the store business when the area, so it must have been about ten years. Our family was all born while I was in the store.
Interviewer: Mr. Copeland, how did they acquire your property when they first came in and started talking about taking over this area?
Mr. Copeland: They didn’t talk about taking it over. They just came down and looked around and knew what they were doing. When they got ready, they issued an “Order of Taking” and told us to get out of the property. I believe they gave us, of November the 15th they told us to move and I had a going store business at that time.
Interviewer: And what year was this?
Mr. Copeland: And told us to be out by December the 1st and we thought that meant what it said and that’s what we tried to do.
Interviewer: What year was this?
Mr. Copeland: It was 1942. That was in December. That’s when we moved out of in December the first of 1942.
Interviewer: Where did you move to then?
Mr. Copeland: I moved to Clinton. I bought a house and lot in Clinton. Property was rather hard to find for the people, because everyone here had to find a place to live somewhere, and they only had very few days to find one. The government didn’t show us very much consideration.
Interviewer: You had less than thirty days to vacate, right?
Mr. Copeland: Oh yes. No one had thirty days that I know of, most of them from the time they got their Order of Taking and knew what the government was going to do, the notices extended out over from 7 days to two to three weeks.
Interviewer: Were you given, monetarily, what you thought was the value of your property?
Mr. Copeland: No, I certainly didn’t because I had added a dwelling house to my property. I had paid, I’d built a four room house with running water in it and I had improved our house by adding a bathroom and put in running water and electricity. I’d improved the store building and I had a warehouse building and I still only was offered the same price when the government come in to take it over, that I had paid for in 1935. Prices had advanced quite rapidly since then and I got very little increase in mine from the court jury, because the government attorneys at that time, and our attorneys, couldn’t overcome it for some reason. I guess our attorneys maybe didn’t understand. But the judge instructed the jury that the government witnesses sense of values was right, and couldn’t take our sense of values of our witnesses because they weren’t accurate. The witnesses said they were interested witnesses, because they were people that lived here.
Interviewer: So in other words, more than likely most people only got whatever they had paid for their property?
Mr. Copeland: Well, some of them may have gotten a little more. Some of them didn’t get as much as they had paid for their property, not as much as they had put in it in their development that they had had. But most everybody, there wasn’t anyone satisfied with what the government paid them for their property. Oh we had one little lady up the, lived on the hill, Ms. Dicey, what was her last name, anyway she just had an acre and a little house, a little shack on it, an acre of ground and she had a shack and a little place to keep a horse or a cow, a little barn thing. True, it’s just an acre but it was her home and she had a home on it. They only gave her $75 for her total property there. Believe it or not. Wasn’t even enough to move the woman.
Interviewer: Did they help her move?
Mr. Copeland: They did not offer to help anyone move. That’s up to us entirely to do our moving, find our own place to live. We had no help in locating property either. TVA before had taken property up in the TVA section and at that time, TVA helped people find farms, help people, they assisted them in moving and did everything in the world they could to help them, but when they took over this property there’s no help offered nor given.
Interviewer: How did you receive notification?
Mr. Copeland: By letter. The man came around with an Order of Taking and told us when to move, and said that we had recourse to the courts and the money for the place was to be deposited in the court. And if we wanted to accept we could and that’s the only thing we had.
Interviewer: Did anyone that you know of balk at this and refused to move?
Mr. Copeland: Over 90% of people. We had a mass meeting at the Scarboro School at that time and I think the school building was just about full. We had people representing the government who attended and we all attended. I don’t believe there was hardly a family here that wasn’t represented and they were unanimous in telling the government that they weren’t treated right in purchasing the property. At that time they didn’t all have their values either. They didn’t know what they were going to be offered for their property.
Interviewer: Well after you knew that it was being used for a project though for the war, did you all change your mind a little bit about giving up your homes?
Mr. Copeland: That’s the only reason the people here gave up their homes as easy as they did, is because they thought it was war time and they thought they were doing their part in helping the war effort. Yes, it was taken over as a war effort.
Interviewer: You knew this…
Mr. Copeland: Yes, we didn’t know what it was going to be, but we knew that it was something concerning the defense of the country. And of course all these people had children and they had people in the army and they had people in the service and they didn’t want to do anything to harm their boys in the service. A lot of them wouldn’t have moved if it hadn’t been for the fact that it was wartime.
Interviewer: Okay so when did you come back into Oak Ridge with your business?
Mr. Copeland: I was out approximately from December 1st of ’42, till about March of ’44. I opened the East Village Service Station that the government had there. When I went to Clinton, I looked around for something to do and I went into the recapping business where the Don Chevrolet was. I rented a building there from Mr. Seeber, Mr. Pete, and put in a recapping shop and had a garage. We serviced most of the trucks and cars coming into Oak Ridge from the north at this place. We had the, we all were doing something to further the war effort. When I came back into the area in March to open the Esso service station in East Village.
Interviewer: What did you have to do? Did you have to get permission of the government as a civilian to do this?
Mr. Copeland: No the government asked me if I would come down and give them a bid on it and operate it. At first I didn’t pay much attention to it ‘cause I had all I could do and they had these bids out for lease. They called me one Saturday morning and says, “Aren’t you coming to give us a bid on this?” And I said, “Well just haven’t had time.” And they said “Well, give me some kind of a figure.” And I pulled a figure out of the air and gave it to them and they called me up in about an hour and said, “It’s yours.” So that’s the way I got my first contract.
Interviewer: You could sort of care less.
Mr. Copeland: Yes because we all had all we could do at that time.
Interviewer: I want to go back a little bit and ask you something about the school when you were living, you know when you’d moved from your brother’s store and opened your own store and you remodeled your home and all. Were your children of school age at that time?
Mr. Copeland: Well, my youngest son didn’t enter school until about 19… I guess he went to the first grade at Scarboro, I mean the oldest son, yes, that would have been when Scarboro was first built. The first year that Scarboro School was built which would have been, I expect, ’39, I guess.
Interviewer: Now Scarboro was out toward UT Farm?
Mr. Copeland: Yes, that’s right. Scarboro’s where the UT Farm is, that building there is where some of the offices are, was the new building that the WPA built to house the grammar schools for this section.
Interviewer: So that was quite some distance for the children to travel?
Mr. Copeland: Well it was three miles, but they came from further than that because they came from Batley and everywhere and everybody in this section went to that grammar school by way of school bus.
Interviewer: And what was the school bus?
Mr. Copeland: Well they had several school buses. Most of them were private; you know they were private contractors that hauled children.
Interviewer: Were they actual cars or wagons?
Mr. Copeland: No they were real buses. When we first came to this section most of them were school wagons, they’d pull with a team of mules, team of horses. It was a kind of four or five seated pack we called it, pulled by two horses and it was pretty hard going. They’d, but they went to Robertsville from here at that time. From where our farm was, the people that were driving the school bus would turn around at our place. It was quite a trip down to Robertsville for the school children at that time. That was when Robertsville first became a high school, they were still most of them coming in just the old homemade trucks, and they’d done away with the horses by that time, but they were still using old homemade trucks with homemade beds built on them for school buses.
Interviewer: What year was this approximately?
Mr. Copeland: Approximately 1920-…well I can’t remember much about it ‘till about 1922 or ‘23 when I actually came out here but the wagons started, I think the last wagon was operated by about 1925 or ‘6, they operated the last wagon.
Interviewer: Where did you all go to church, Mr. Copeland?
Mr. Copeland: Well, there was quite a few small churches. The place that our folks went to church was, there was a little independent church at Lupton, that’s about two miles from where the Marina is now. There was a little road there past times that went across from the Emory Valley Road over to the Clinton and Oliver Springs road. There was a little schoolhouse building that had been turned into a church that was called Lupton and Lupton’s Crossroads. But there was two churches just north on the Clinton Oliver Springs Road at that time, one was a Methodist and one was a, you know, I don’t remember exactly the denomination of the other. Of course there was a good Baptist church at East Fork and there was a good Baptist church that we called New Hope. There was a, and there was a Presbyterian church and a Baptist church in Scarboro. We had churches. These people were church going people. They had churches when they didn’t have schools.
Interviewer: Now you’re talking about in the early 20’s?
Mr. Copeland: Yes, in the early 20’s, yes m’am. And of course the churches were about the same all, they used, only about two or three of the churches had a full time pastor. But we were all well represented with the Methodist and Baptist and Presbyterian.
Interviewer: Did most of them have pastors who went from church to church?
Mr. Copeland: Yes most of them had a pastor that had more than one church, usually had about three, a circuit of churches, most of them did. The, I guess the Solway Church, I guess New Hope Church had the, first church that had a regular pastor, full time pastor.
Interviewer: What did the young people do for entertainment?
Mr. Copeland: Oh, I know what we did down at our house. We had the time of our lives. We fished and hunted in the summer time. We sat on the riverbanks over the weekend. We worked through the week, and occasionally some of the people would have a, what we, someone would ride around on horseback, and when someone would decide to have a dance at some of the homes somewhere, and they would cover each valley and somebody would go on horseback to make the invitations and so they’d usually be pretty well attended. We usually had local fiddle music and I remember, there was some very good square dancers in this section, I’ll tell you. That’s about the only entertainment they did as a community.
Interviewer: How many quilting bees and barn raising…
Mr. Copeland: Not that I know of here. That was a little bit before my time. We had box suppers sometimes and things like that to raise money to run the churches on and we’d have ice cream suppers. I know when we built the little Presbyterian mission at Elza, that was what they use to call the, oh what did they call it here, the…community house was a little, that was right in East Village, I forgot what they called it, but you have the records of that. But I helped build that church. The Presbyterian mission board gave us a grant from some lady in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and this money was applied to start the church. Some people donated lumber and some people donated labor. I was a country merchant down there and I had the responsibility mostly of digging some money out of all the people that would give any and all of them were pretty liberal considering how much money they had. We had an old gristmill where we first started our first Sunday school services there. And we had a missionary from the Presbyterian Church in Knoxville and he’d come out and hold Sunday school when the church was organized. They sent us a preacher for part of the Sundays. I think that was their mission, their preachers that were trainee preachers. I remember we had a, we needed a piano after we got our church built, and we needed benches and we needed a lot of things. We had an ice cream supper one night at the, on the church lawn to introduce the people to the church and that was about as successful a financial arrangement we could have. We only bought twenty gallons of ice cream. We had Sani Seal to ship it out to us on the train and it was unloaded at Elza. That’s the only way we could get ice cream in those days though packed in ice of course. So we built our little frame around the twenty gallons of ice cream and we made lemonade and that’s all we had to sell was lemonade and ice cream. But you know that little party raised over a hundred dollars for this church. We must have cut those ice cream cones awful small. I’d hate to tell you how we made some of the lemonade because we didn’t have any water up there, but we got water somewhere.
Interviewer: Was this what is called the Chapel on the Hill now?
Mr. Copeland: No that was, what, that was the church that was originally at the corner of, Arkansas House. It was on the corner of Arkansas Avenue. You remember the Arkansas House. It’s been torn down now, yes but it did go all through the area. It wasn’t torn down until after Oak Ridge. You remember the Arkansas House.
Interviewer: Oh, I remember it. There used to be some flat tops…
Mr. Copeland: Yes, and so many of the church groups started in the Arkansas House. Yes, they built flat tops all around it. It was on the corner of the Turnpike and the Arkansas House.
Interviewer: It’s right across from what station now?
Mr. Copeland: Well, it’d be the East Village Service Station, yes.
Interviewer: Is that where it was?
Mr. Copeland: Yes, that’s East Village Shell, that was where my station was, right in back of that where the old station was, that was the East Village Esso Station.
Interviewer: Where did you go from there? How long did you run, operate that station and then what did you do?
Mr. Copeland: I operated that station in, I expect I didn’t sell that station until 1950 to ’51. I guess it was, when I had, in the meantime I had opened a Woodridge Home and Auto Supply Store and a parts house in the Fall of ’48 in the old Municipal Market Building where they had moved out some of the, the government had had a storehouse there, and a dining room and a lot of other things but that’s, so they cut it up in storage and rented it. That was for where the original, that’s before Downtown took. What was the name of that shopping center, I guess that was the market, Municipal Market, yeah.
Interviewer: On the site of the now Downtown?
Mr. Copeland: Yes. That was on the site where the Texaco station is and the bowling alley and that was the original site of the, so there were several stores, that was cut up and made into several stores. When they took that over then there were stores open in Grove Center so’s I rented a place over there from Roane Anderson. So we always had a place to do business.
Interviewer: You had to move a little bit to do it but…
Mr. Copeland: Yes we moved a lot, several times.
Interviewer: What were your feelings when you heard about the bomb?
Mr. Copeland: I was, kind of had a feeling that perhaps we had done some good in Oak Ridge. I had had a suspicion that they were trying to split the atom here, when we first moved out of Oak Ridge, because one of my friends at Sunday School at the First Methodist Church in Clinton had told us that they were pretty sure they were going to try to split the atom here in Oak Ridge. That’s what he had heard. We didn’t know they were trying to make a bomb out of it. But the, with all the secrecy there was around, we knew it had to be something big. So when the news broke, why everybody was quite, they were pleased that they had had an opportunity to be a part of the, such a thing as building an atomic bomb. However we weren’t proud of the bomb at all, but I think they all were glad that it would have some effect on the war.
Interviewer: Glad it was us and not the Germans who developed it.
Mr. Copeland: That’s right.
Interviewer: When the news broke, did they announce that this had been developed in the Oak Ridge complex?
Mr. Copeland: It wasn’t called Oak Ridge then. It was getting to be called that but, yes, they said that the, they gave Oak Ridge credit for developing the atom bomb, yes ma’m. I made a trip not long after that, to Detroit to visit some friends there, some folks up there and do some purchasing. I always carried some book matches and it had my business address on it, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and it was quite a souvenir up there, to get something from Oak Ridge for those people in Detroit, so that and everywhere we’d travel, people had heard about Oak Ridge.
Interviewer: Mr. Copeland when you first start, with the war effort became so great down here, did ya’ll have any trouble getting any supplies and things you needed to sell? How did you get your stuff to sell?
Mr. Copeland: Well we had to call on the Army to help us with priorities which they gladly did. We didn’t get enough rubber, we had recapping…[end of tape]
[Side 2- Flip tape now – rest of this side is blank.]
Mr. Copeland: Oh yes, talking about supplies. I don’t think anyone in Oak Ridge obtained the amount of things they needed to sell. It was very hard anywhere to get, however Oak Ridgers got more stuff than anybody else did. Now we didn’t get one tire out of a hundred that we could sell, but we did have a franchise with BF Goodrich Company and we got the, when the tires were rationed, we had only had a very small stock of tires. I turned my tires in from the country store and that’s the only tires that I was entitled to. We only carried about 15 or 20 tires in the country store, so they only issued me about 15 or 20 certificates. So we, the government let us buy certificates from other people and places, so’s I bought for a dollar a piece. I bought certificates that was legal from Washington D.C. and places like that where they had more tire certificates than they had tires. From that I managed to buy tires all over the country wherever I could buy them. Of course gasoline wasn’t a problem, they furnished us with gasoline. Our ration boards here were a little more liberal in, with the ration stamps than they were most places and there were more liberal with tires, because the people had to get to work and they had to travel to get work and the only way they could get here was on either the buses that private operators were operating, or in their own vehicle. Of course, everybody had a ride club and more than one person rode in every car. In fact most cars were filled with passengers. But it wasn’t too awfully bad. I personally, I wasn’t short of anything because always some friend was giving me something and doing something for me. I don’t know how that came about but we always had some. I had some of the best meat in my life when the war was going on because Roane Anderson had bought cattle and brought in here and killed them and slaughtered cattle. We got the best beef that they got anywhere in the country. I wish I could get some good beef like that now.
Interviewer: Did they sell it to the public or to the stores?
Mr. Copeland: Well they sold through the stores, through each, the community stores were the biggest group of stores. HG Hackney Company, people had the community stores. You had one in East Village and one on top of the hill at, well that wasn’t finished in fact, but it had one in Grove Center and they had one down at K-25, they had three or four and then of course the A&P came into Jackson Square which was a great bonanza. I think they sold their entire stock about every Saturday night. You’d go by their window and their shelves would be empty. But I don’t think we all suffered very much. We had more than we’d been used to.
Interviewer: And possibly more than other cities.
Mr. Copeland: I’m sure we had more than they did in other places.
Interviewer: Can you tell us about some of the people that were your friends when you were a young man before we had Oak Ridge even thought of?
Mr. Copeland: I believe you asked me about the old gentleman in the short sleeves that was sitting on the front of the store there in the picture that we had made just before we left Oak Ridge. His name was, he was a Baptist preacher and he had lost both of his arms, both of his hands, they were off above the wrist. He lived just a short distance above the store, but he was one of the best old gentlemen I ever knew, I guess. His oldest daughter, Stella, she was a, she worked for the superintendent of schools at the time they took this area over. He had two more daughters that were teachers in the high schools. One of the boys was Frank Hightower who lived down in East Fork Valley, and he had another boy that worked at the airport in Knoxville but his wife is still living. She is about 100 years old, her name is Molly and she lives with her oldest daughter, Mrs. Reed in Clinton. She was a great old person until of course the last few years I think, she doesn’t know anything, she doesn’t know anybody, her mind isn’t good; she’s in good health but her mind isn’t too good, but she was a wonderful person. Most everybody in this country except the Copelands I guess were kin to about everybody else. I had to be awfully careful, ‘cause I was a stranger, we were strangers in this part of the country. We came from somewhere else and most everybody was born and raised here.
Interviewer: You were new blood coming in. What happened to your family’s farm? Did they keep it until the government moved in?
Mr. Copeland: Yeah, well my dad had sold half of the farm just a year or two before the government came in. And he sold it rather cheap ‘cause my Dad had had, he was getting old and wasn’t able to run the farm. Times were pretty hard. He had sold half the farm at a pretty low price and built him a new house across the road. That was one thing that threw the values, there wasn’t very many sales that they had to go by, down here, and that was one thing that knocked these prices of this land down, because that was only one of the few places they had to go by. Anybody that had sold land or anything in this part of the country in the five or ten years before that, had sold it because they had to, because it was sold at very low prices.
Interviewer: Land was valued not only just monetarily but it’s something to own.
Mr. Copeland: That’s right. Land was something to own and it wasn’t. We didn’t realize how, we couldn’t place a dollar and cents value on our land because that was our homes and our farms. Of course about half the people down here had a child or themselves that worked at the Magnet Mills in Clinton you know, which gave us, or they some of them worked at the coal mines and traveled back and forth to Beech Grove, Beech Fork, and Fork Mountain to mine coal and some as far as Caryville from here at that time. But I guess the Magnet Mills was the biggest source of cash that we had for the people that owned the property around here.
Interviewer: That was in the early 1920’s when that was operated?
Mr. Copeland: Yes, in the ‘20s to ’25 or ’30 Magnet Mills was quite a thing. That was the most important source of income in Anderson County outside of coal mining.
Interviewer: In other words if you wanted to supplement your farming income that’s what you did more than likely?
Mr. Copeland: Yes, some of the girls worked at the mill or their mothers or something. I know the best, anybody, anytime I could get an account at the store, that worked at the mill, that was my bread and butter because they always paid their bill every week when the payday came around.
Interviewer: Did you otherwise run up pretty good tabs on people or charge accounts?
Mr. Copeland: Yes, we did our best to serve them as much as we could however we didn’t have any yearly accounts like most of the old people did. Of course between the railroad after, there was quite a few railroaders that had lived around here two or three, three or four families and I remember when they went off of the railroad pension, it was several months before the railroad could get their pension, and we’d carry these people but they were all very fine about it. Everybody paid me, so they didn’t have to worry about that.
Interviewer: Didn’t have to worry like you do now about people.
Mr. Copeland: Yeah I had people, I had more people for a time down there that wouldn’t pay than I do now, I’m sure. Of course I was a little bit, I was a little easier to give credit but I, it was awful. You always have people that won’t pay you, any community or any place however you knew about them. Everybody knew who wouldn’t pay and who would pay, so it wasn’t very much of a problem if you just asked somebody. They’d tell you whether they’d pay you or not.
Interviewer: It was your fault if you didn’t know.
Mr. Copeland: That’s right. [break in tape] Oak Ridge is one of the finest places to live I think you could imagine. It has good churches. It has a variety of people. It has the best schools in the state of Tennessee and we have the finest people. Since they come from all over the country there’s not any one part of the country that rules Oak Ridge. The conglomeration of the whole United States it looks like and I’ve enjoyed knowing most of them. Most of them are kind people.
Interviewer: Mr. Copeland, kids have always broken arms and legs, what did you do before Oak Ridge for a doctor?
Mr. Copeland: Well my wife had one of those breaking leg deals but we were running the country store and she stepped up on my boy’s old rattle trap truck to get her a peach and stepped down and as she stepped down, she trailed her foot and broke both bones just above the ankle. I was working for TVA at that time. I’d just gotten this job a little while before. We had the first income that was more than we needed to live on in our life at that time and she was operating the country store while I worked in daytime and of course I operated the store at night. When she broke these two legs that put her out of business and I had to quit my truck driving when she had, she only broke one leg but two bones in one leg. So we carried the poor girl into the house next door where my brother lived and called the doctor from Clinton and he came down and…
Interviewer: Was it Dr. Taylor?
Mr. Copeland: No, Dr. Jennings. He was killed later up there in an automobile accident in Clinton. But the bone was sticking out there in her leg so we proceeded to, the neighbors and boy, we proceeded with the doctor’s help, to pull the bones back in place. Then we took her over to Knoxville to the Howard Henderson Hospital, I guess at that time, in the car and where they X-rayed it, Dr. Henderson X-rayed it, and put the cast on it the next day. But he didn’t have to do anything to it as far as setting the leg’s concerned. The country doctor did as good as job as, there was nothing done about it except just put the cast on.
Interviewer: Was this in the mid ‘40’s or late ‘40’s or something like that?
Mr. Copeland: No that was earlier than that. That was about the early ‘30’s in the 1933 I guess, or ’34 when TVA first, had first started building Norris Dam. See they had to hire a lot of trucks and things to haul timbers and things like that in to build the town of Norris. We all could get jobs at that time.
Interviewer: And you had telephone service throughout here?
Mr. Copeland: Well at the time there was not any telephones. Mr. Cross just across the river, just above the railroad where, they had the only phone in this local section until you got down as far as, there was not anymore phones from Mr. Cross’s place down. Who had a phone down here through Oliver Springs?
[Third voice in the distance-unable to distinguish]
Mr. Copeland: Well, yeah, but that was later. We had some telephone service but it wasn’t very good. I know when we first came out here from Knox County, my dad still was an official over there in the courthouse, so’s he almost had to have a phone, so we had two phone companies. There was a new and the old phone companies. Peoples Telephone Company and The Coalman Telephone Company. It was seven miles over to Scarboro but it was only about three miles, two miles and a half where we could hit some more poles. So we built two miles and a half of poles and there was two phones, us and the next door, and the people lived next door put a telephone in and we run the line over to Scarboro, that was… And we had to run our own line and service our own line. So it was down about half the time, every time a storm would come, why the line would get blown down.
Interviewer: What kind of wire did you use?
Mr. Copeland: Well we used regular telephone wire and insulators. They were pretty far apart the phone was, ‘cause we only had the one line going. That’s the way we had communication then, but this telephone company went out of business in just a year or two, two or three years I guess it was, so it was about 19-, it didn’t do us any good for very many years. At Elza Mr. Cross had the only phone that was connected to Clinton and so’s that, where we everybody used his telephone.
Interviewer: Is that where you called the doctor?
Mr. Copeland: Yes. If our little baby got sick in the night, at 12 o’clock at night, we went up and woke Mr. Cross up and they always got up with a smile. You used the phone and the doctor came down at that time of night. Funniest thing, I know our oldest son, we’d been away somewhere for the day. We had an old Ford Coupe. We’d been out somewhere and came back. We’d given him a sandwich and it had a pickle on it and he was just a little bitty fellow so’s he ate the pickle and all, but about 10 or 11 o’clock he kept getting sicker and sicker. He had a tremendously high fever. So we were a young couple and so we were scared to death. At 11 o’clock I went up to Mr. Cross’s and called Dr. Hall from Clinton. He got up out of bed and came down. By the time Dr. Hall come down the boy had vomited and lost his pickle and stuff and he didn’t have a bit of temperature or nothing else and he was perfectly quiet. And here the doctor came in and the boy wasn’t even sick.
Interviewer: And that was a long trip from Clinton?
Mr. Copeland: Yes it was. But the doctor certainly, he just smiled about it. He never did fuss at me for calling him like that, said that’s what he’s for - to call.
Interviewer: Who were some of your other neighbors when you lived in the Robertsville area? Mr. Copeland: Well, the people lived next door to me were the Pecks, and the Roberts across the street from the Pecks that owned where the high school is, the Roberts and Pecks, Pecks on one side and Roberts on the other. And back going toward Scarboro was the Clyde Peak Farm and up, we had a lot of neighbors. We had the Grubbs and the oh, let me see, what’s the little Thornton girl’s….yeah well, we had Roger Irwin and Glen Irwin and…
Interviewer: Raines.
Mr. Copeland: Yes, the Raines do you remember the Raines? Yeah they lived at Elza. They were neighbors right close to the store at Elza. They had quite a large family. I guess most of his family’s born there at Elza. Virgil Raines run the, he had charge of the state road between, I guess his territory covered all this end. He had a grader, that’s the only way with a gravel road, you had to keep a grader on it constantly or it would get full of holes and it’d be impassable. That was Virgil’s job. He had a pretty good job. He had one of the better jobs in the country. But…
Interviewer: What about the Pyatts, did they live close to you?
Mr. Copeland: Yes the Pyatts were one of the, they were part of the pillars of the community. Mr. John Pyatt was always a member of the county court. He was always the squire and he was executor of about everybody’s estate, about everybody’s will. When anybody died, why Mr. Pyatt, Mr. John, was the executor of their will, he was one of the important people of the community. Of course the Pyatts and the Hightowers were all related. Everybody was related to each other. The Garrisons and the Tolsons. Clara Pyatt, she married one of the Pyatt boys and Bill Parton run Mr. Clyde Peak’s farm and we had the Jenkins that lived on down below him. Where Glen Irwin lived that was originally farm belonging to one of the older, some of the older regional people in this section by the name of Peak, not Peak but, I’m trying to think of the old man, Kincaid. And Bob Kincaid’s folks, what was the man’s name that owned the farm down here that Glen Irwin bought from? His name was, oh… you know as we get older we forget a lot of these names until someone calls them for us.
Interviewer: It’s amazing that you had so many of them.
Mr. Copeland: Well I knew every family in here from Wheat to Clinton. Some time or other some of them stopped at our store and we had, I know one of our doctor’s here in Oak Ridge, his father was the first principal of the Robertsville High School, Dr. Hendrix. His father’s is still, still a great professor but he was one of the finest professors that we ever had, one of the finest principals that we’ve ever had of our high school. He was the first high school principal that we had I think here. Mr. Cross lived across the river, one of our dentists, Charles Cross was his grandson. He used to come to the store with his grandpa and he’d ride in front of the horse when he was just a little bitty fellow and he still remembers. He always did remember us.
Interviewer: Did a family called the Gambles settle in Gamble Valley and is that why it has its name today?
Mr. Copeland: Yes that’s exactly why the Gamble Valley is called that, because there were quite a few families of Gambles lived down there. A man John Gamble was the head of the clan and there was, divided up into brothers and sisters and sons and daughters, and there was I expect, there was four or five different families of Gambles down there. By the way, they could make the best molasses that I believe I have ever eaten. Anytime you get Charlie Gamble molasses you could always get a dollar a gallon for them. The only thing was getting Charlie to sell you enough molasses. Mr. Pyatt also made molasses but Charlie Gamble’s molasses was the one that was in big demand. They, Mr. Pyatt made molasses. They had the Bonnie and Bonnie Pyatt and Ralph Pyatt. Ralph Pyatt works for the schools now and Bonnie worked for one of the service stations there in Clinton. But they made molasses each fall and everybody brought their cane to that, pale mostly, but anytime Mr. Charlie Gamble had molasses it was always the choice molasses.
Interviewer: Is this the Gamble family that has the funeral home in Clinton?
Mr. Copeland: They are distant relations. No that’s a different family but they were related, yes ma’m.
Interviewer: I think the Gambles have again, when they settled in Clinton or outside of Clinton, they settled in one area.
Mr. Copeland: Now we had another family of Gambles that lived just about where, well, right across the street from the Reeder Motor Company, right in that section. And there’s a little Gamble graveyard right there close by, at the, that was still another family of Gambles but they did move to Clinton, that was Laura Gamble and some of the Gambles that moved to Clinton.
Interviewer: And that’s their graveyard that private place.
Mr. Copeland: There’s a little graveyard that belonged to the Gambles, was on the Gamble’s farm, yes.
Interviewer: Did different farms, like you mentioned the Gamble’s, seem to specialize in molasses, did other families sort of have specialties that if you sort of looked forward to?
Mr. Copeland: I expect you would call it that. I know some people could raise better tobacco than others, and some people raised better cattle. When our farm, my dad raised mostly corn and ‘bout everybody on the river bottom. I think that’s about all we knew to raise on those bottoms that would give us a cash crop. People would come all winter long to my dad’s crib to get corn. Most of the time it was bought in the ear and they would shuck it themselves and take it to the gristmill, 15-20 bushels at a time they could haul in their wagons. And they would come and sometimes they would have the money to pay for it and sometimes Dad would have to sell it to them on credit, but he always had corn for a man that came after corn.
Interviewer: Do you remember how much it was a bushel?
Mr. Copeland: Yes I sure do. I know, I’m not going to tell you about the time it’s 38 cents a bushel. That was when I raised corn. Most of the time corn was a dollar a bushel and one time right after World War One when we first, the corn was as high as $2 a bushel, but it was a dollar a bushel most of the time from that until about 1930-’31, it dropped down to almost nothing. I know the year, my first corn crop was raised in 1932, and my wife and I sat in the crib all winter shucking 3,000 bushel of corn but we never got over 38 cents a bushel for any of it and we had shuck and shell all of that. They didn’t buy it in the ear.
Interviewer: Where was the nearest gristmill?
Mr. Copeland: There was one at Elza and then there was a gristmill at, down where the store complex that I bought from Mrs. Lockett. They had a gristmill there. Mr. McWayne run the gristmill there and it was situated right in the corner where Emory Valley Road turned up from the Clinton Highway Road which was just about, oh it’s still in the same neighbor as all of Robertsville was. But he could grind, he made good meal. He knew how to run his, how to keep his rock sharp and of course he used a gasoline engine. We didn’t use a water wheel there, but he always knew how to keep his rock sharp and made good meal. He didn’t burn his meal up like some of them did.
Interviewer: Is this the Mr. McWayne that lives in Clinton now? Or above Clinton?
Mr. Copeland: Yes, well he lives, both of the men are dead now that run that mill, but they did live in Clinton. His wife lives on Main Street just as you enter Clinton. He and his wife lives, he was the operator, one of the operators at the mill, he and Henry and his wife live over at on the at Sulfur Springs on the Oak Ridge Road.
Interviewer: I’m going to have to interview those two people.
Mr. Copeland: Oh they, I guess Georgie could tell you more than I could. Now the Ms. Carter at the, that lives right at the foot of the hill as you turn up to on 61 where it turns off, the little house in the hollow there, Ms Roxie Carter could tell you more than I could ever tell you, because she lived here before we did. She was a Hendrix and she knew everybody in this country, her mother did especially. Her mother’s one of the finest people I ever knew. Her name was, mother lived right straight on top of the hill above where, well back on Viking Road, up that road. Well, if you get in touch with --?Euricus?-- Cross he will tell you where his sister Lillian can be located. I believe Lillian will remember more than most anyone about this section because Lillian knew everybody and she always kept contact with everyone. --?Euricus?-- Cross, tell you about that name. --?Euricus?-- was one side of the family and the Cross the other. The Cross that, was one of the Cross’ who owned the farm where my father bought, when he first come here. The name --?Euricus?-- was the --?Euricus’?-- that lived, owned all the property from, oh just a little below where the Gambles lived on down to about, almost about half way up and down from Elza to Robertsville, and they owned the property all the way back almost to the top of the Ridge where we have all the houses built now. That was the Euricus, Mrs. Euricus was a wonderful character. She lived to be about 85 or 87 years old and she was strong right up I think about as long as she lived. Her, Sally Cross was Euricus Cross’ mother and she just passed away about a year ago. Now she could sure tell you about everybody. She was one of the finest square dancers I’ve ever known. Even though she was in two car wrecks and got run over up on the road and got all of her bones broken, she still would heal up and come back and be ready to dance the next dance that would come along. She was really a, really a tough character. I mean physically, not, she was a fine person.
Interviewer: Was she kin to the Shinlevers in Clinton?
Mr. Copeland: The Shinlevers were, they married the, I don’t know whether Cross was related to the Shinlevers or not. The Shinlevers are the people that took picture that I had in the paper, but one of the Shinlevers married into the family that lived down on the river, down where the park is now, where the Carbide Park is on that part of property. That was, their name was, wasn’t Diggs was it? Well, the Diggs lived there and the, well one of the Diggs married Shinlever. Yes, I’m sure they did. They have that property. The Blacks lived right across the river from the farm where the Marina is. That was John Black and one of their families was Mr. Oscar Tunnell, Tunnell they called it at that time. Mr. Oscar Tunnell would ride his horse up to our farm and cross the river there and leave his horse in the stable. It’s about the only way when we first came out here, that he had to visit his sister over at Black’s farm. Now he had a mortgage on about every farm in Anderson County I guess. He was President of the Tri County National Bank at Oliver Springs and he was also an uncle to our present attorney here in Oak Ridge, Lawrence Tunnell but he was an uncle to Lawrence. He owned about, I guess he had more money. He always had cash money for somebody to loan. I think he did more private loaning for himself than he did for the bank.
Interviewer: What sort of loans could you get on property? Say you were buying a 300 acre farm, would you have to have a certain percent cash down or..?
Mr. Copeland: Yes it was, well you didn’t have the opportunity to borrow money in those days like you do now. You, the farm, the federal government had a farm loan office and I think its still in existence. It used to be headquartered in Kentucky but that was about the best place to get a good farm loan or from some of the insurance companies. The local banks would give you a loan on some farms but most farms were bought through borrowed money from the bank or from some insurance company.
Interviewer: Did you have monthly payments or an annual payment?
Mr. Copeland: No there were mostly annually payments in those days. They didn’t have many monthly payments. Annual payments could be made, or semi-annual payments could be made much better than monthly payments could be made.
Interviewer: Would you have to have say 50% down back then to buy a farm?
Mr. Copeland: At least that, yes, most the time, 33 1/3 was the very minimum you had to have. You had to have that at least 33 1/3% down to buy a house or a farm either one before we had the help that we have now from the government. But we got along fine doing it. You could always get a down payment down for something.
Interviewer: Mr. Copeland thank you a lot for letting us come to your home and interview you and your wife and you come down at the library and listen to this tape. It’ll be on record down there at the archives.
Mr. Copeland: It’s sure been a pleasure to talk to both of you and I believe you folks have done enough investigating around here; I believe you know more about the people than I do.
Interviewer: We hope so. We’ll learn a lot more. Thank you very much.
Transcribed: June 2005
Typed by LB